The Lockdown Papers

By John Dillon

The Lockdown Papers is a miscellany of satire, reflection and analysis of Irish life over five decades from academic and columnist John Dillon. 

When Ireland went into lockdown in March 2020, the author availed of the down time provided to compile a selection of his social and political essays, ranging f

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katounia Press
• Release date: Mar 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781838345402

John Dillon

John Dillon is Regius Professor of Greek (Emeritus) in Trinity College Dublin, having returned there in 1980 from a period in the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a member of the Classics Department from 1969 onwards. His chief area of interest is the philosophy of Plato and the tradition deriving from him, on which he has written a number of books. This is his debut novel.

Book preview

THE

LOCKDOWN

PAPERS:

Social and Political Essays

John Dillon

.

Katounia-logo-horiz.indd

By the same author

The Middle Platonists (1977/1996)

Salt and Olives: Morality and Custom in Ancient Greece (2004)

The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (2005)

The Roots of Platonism (2018)

As editor

The Greek Sophists (Penguin Classics, 2003)

The Enneads by Plotinus (Penguin Classics, 1991)

Fiction

The Scent of Eucalyptus (2019)

Copyright page

The Lockdown Papers

1st Edition Published by

Katounia Press, Dublin, 2021

www.KatouniaPress.com

ISBN: 978-1-8383454-0-2

© John Dillon 2021

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, copied, digitally reproduced or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding, cover or digital format other than that in which it is published.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Dillon is Regius Professor of Greek (Emeritus) in Trinity College Dublin, having returned there in 1980 from a period in the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a member of the Classics Department from 1969 onwards. Prior to that, after graduating from Oxford, he spent some years in Ethiopia, teaching English in Addis Ababa. His chief area of interest is the philosophy of Plato and the tradition deriving from him, but he has always had an interest in more popular forms of writing as well, together with a weakness for practical politics, which he does his best to resist. The present volume contains a selection of the results of these journalistic tendencies. A second edition of his novel, A Scent of Eucalyptus, came out in 2019.

See more at: www.JohnDillon.ie

Acknowledgements:

These collected letters, esssays and articles

first appeared in The Irish Times, The Irish Independent

and The Sunday Independent

from the 1960s until the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Preface

This is a book of surprises, offering the perspectives on life and society of a learned mind infused with humour, anger, irony, irreverence and much that is wise over forty years of a richly lived life.

John Dillon, former Professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin, and a member of one of the country’s most distinguished political families, provides us, in The Lockdown Papers, with a book of essays, letters and newspaper articles that span from his African years to his most recent reflections on twenty-first century events.

The greater part of the book is taken up with a running commentary on the main political, social and cultural events in the changing Ireland of the 1970s to recent times. Hindsight often deals harshly with judgements and predictions handed down on an almost weekly basis and John Dillon often got it wrong – with the evidence here for all to read. But more often than not he is on the ball, and clearly he has good material to work with, as he takes us through the Haughey years and the scandals of those frenetic times.

Rumours, often of a most lurid kind, are revisited, and more than once the reality proved even more lurid. We meet again Bishop Casey and Larry Goodman, the Kerry babies, the various tribunals, Brendan Smyth and the missing files, political heaves and coups that were and predicted coups that never were. We follow the emerging sex scandals in the Catholic Church and the arrogance and complacency of a hierarchy accustomed to unquestioning obedience.

It offers us commentary on events as they happened – as the country argued with itself over the hitherto taboo topics of contraception, abortion and divorce. Gay rights were still far in the future, but on these issues we get the robust, informed and often acerbic views made without fear or the benefit of hindsight. For most people of a certain age, their own memories will be awakened, and not always comfortably.

And of course, the North is never far away. John Dillon’s views here are those of an old-fashioned constitutionalist. He is hard on Sinn Fein, but as John Dillon’s grandson he is equally alert to the wiles and treachery of perfidious Albion. And like most of us at the time, he had no idea how it would all work out. Or indeed if it would.

On the question of his political predictions and whether he got most of them right: more often than not, not, as I say; but consider this example from 2007, when he counselled Enda Kenny and Pat Rabbitte not to seek to form a coalition when such seemed possible:

‘On the other hand, Enda and Pat, it is better if you stay on your high horses and let Bertie back in for a bit. There is undoubtedly something of a bust-up coming in the economy and it really would not be good for democracy if it could all be blamed on the foostherings of a ramshackle coalition government which would collapse after one and a half years and allow Fianna Fail to coast back in. Better to let Bertie clear up his own mess.’

He got that one right.

John Dillon does not dwell much on his own experience as an election candidate. Perhaps just as well, because if he had followed the family route into politics we would not have had this book – a delightful pot pourri, at times idiosyncratic but written with old-style elegance, pungent and direct where it needs to be, and always with a refreshing absence of humbug, and always with honesty.

Maurice Manning

Introduction

I always wanted to be a ‘writer’ – that is to say, a rather louche character with long, straggly hair, a mauve smoking jacket, a cigarette holder, and perhaps a sultry mistress, based preferably somewhere on the Riviera, or possibly one of the smaller islands of the West Indies. Fate – along with some discreet nudging by my father – decreed that I become an academic instead. Nonetheless, over the years I have from time to time, either provoked or unprovoked, indulged in literary or journalistic experiments of one sort or another, and I thought, at this late stage of my career, that it might be worth gathering some of them together, if only for my own amusement.

In a way, this may be seen as a gentle riposte to my father. I can recall him declaring, when, in 1961, in my early twenties, on the heels of a rather expensive and elaborate education, I declared my preference for turning to creative writing, that it was a very precarious and stressful calling, and that I might well end up like that poor fellow Joyce (he had had occasion to call on James Joyce when he was in Paris as a post-doctoral student of Indo-European philology in the mid-1920s, and had found Joyce’s life-style and living conditions rather depressing, as indeed they were). This, it must be said, coexisted in his mind with a certain regard for Joyce’s writings. He preserved a first edition of Ulysses, which he had picked up in Paris when he was there, and he liked to take down his copy of Finnegans Wake from time to time, and read portions of it out loud. He was also, however, an old friend of Oliver St. John Gogarty, and shared the latter’s scepticism as to the ultimate value of what Joyce was trying to accomplish in the Wake. And he liked to remind people that the famous Tower was not Joyce’s at all, but Gogarty’s.

I also remember him, in that same year, as a desperate device to discourage me, inviting the distinguished journalist Ulick O’Connor out to dinner at the house, with the express remit of describing to me the precariousness of the life of a freelance writer, which Ulick duly did. I remember him emphasising how one is completely at the mercy of one’s editor, and only as good as your last article; in fact, he dutifully laid it on with a trowel, and fully earned his dinner. Slightly sobered by that, I went off instead to teach English in a private school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

But I am wandering from the point. There is in fact every chance that I should not have succeeded as a creative writer, and would have ended up in a garret somewhere in Dublin, propping up the bar in Neary’s, and grumbling to anyone who would listen about the lack of discernment and irremediable philistinism of the general public, which had failed to accord me due recognition. As it is, I have been able to disregard the general public to a very large extent, and to concentrate, from a series of safe havens, on a reasonably appreciative ‘elite’ (a much abused term, in my view!) of sympathizers with Plato and Platonism, while attaining a modest level of recognition and security, and I really cannot quarrel with that.

As far back as my time in Addis Ababa, however, I toyed with the composition of a rather avant-garde novel, entitled The Game of Chess, but it never came to very much. The novel I finally composed about my time there, The Scent of Eucalyptus, came to fruition much later, in 2006. It took a heart attack, in early 1995, and the subsequent recuperation from that, for me to complete it. The titzle was published by a small academic press, the University Press of the South, in New Orleans and in 2019, a revised second edition was published by 451 Editions in Dublin. The new edition is now available by order from most Irish bookshops, and online from all major book retailing websites.

I have also, however, been fortunate enough to be able to indulge my penchant for what might be called creative journalism from time to time. This I did in Oxford, when I was an undergraduate there in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and in the U.S., when I was teaching in the University of California at Berkeley during the 1970s.

In Oxford, it happened that my old friend Auberon Waugh (with whom I had also been at school in Downside) became involved in 1960 in the Oxford literary magazine Isis whereat he roped me in to contribute occasional short stories and other squibs. I also, in the same period, wrote a number of stories for the university newspaper, Cherwell then edited by my friend Nicholas Leonard, who was beginning his distinguished career in journalism.

In Berkeley, where I taught Classics in the University of California from 1966 to 1980, I became quite friendly with the novelist and short-story writer Leonard Michaels, who taught at the time in the English Department, and wrote a column for The San Francisco Review of Books, entitled ‘The Western Spy’. When Lenny got tired of this column, he bequeathed it to me, and I carried it on for a few years, till I in turn got tired of it. I also wrote for a Berkeley journal, University Publishing, chiefly about books.

For these lockdown papers, however, I have selected predominantly journalistic work published after I returned to Ireland, from the 1980s onwards. The exception to this is a couple of articles that I wrote when in Ethiopia during the years 1961–63. One is an interview I had with Jomo Kenyatta (then, as I recall, Minister without Portfolio in a sort of interim administration), when on a visit to Kenya with a friend in the summer of 1962. The second is an account of a visit to the exotic city of Harar, once home to the poet Rimbaud.

Back in Dublin in the 1980s, after returning to Trinity College to take up the position of Regius Professor of Greek, I was introduced by my friend, Nicholas Leonard (see above), who was furthering his career as an journalist at the time as London editor of the Irish Independent, to his boss, Aengus Fanning, and Aengus got me to write a few feature articles for him on various topics of the day. When Aengus was promoted in 1984 to be editor of the Sunday Independent (in which capacity he became, in my view, one of the great Irish newspaper editors of recent times), he took me along with him, again as an occasional contributor of generally satirical pieces on issues of the day.

This relationship continued, on and off, for a period of over twenty years until his much-lamented death in January 2012, and produced quite a body of work. I would have preferred to have had a regular column (even a monthly one, perhaps), but he was never quite prepared to give me that. Instead, Aengus would phone up, at irregular intervals, generally on a Thursday night, and philosophise at me for a while down the phone, before asking if I could do him ‘a thousand words or so’ on whatever was on his mind – this having then to be composed in something under twenty-four hours, a good discipline for an academic!

The results of this are inevitably a series of somewhat ephemeral pieces, but since they are always reflections on subjects of the day, they can be seen as a sort of commentary on the history of the period, and, as such, may still be of some interest. The headings are uniformly the work of a sub-editor (even when I ventured to suggest one, it was gently brushed aside), but I have left them in, as they are generally pertinent, and often witty. I toyed with the provision of short headings or footnotes to elucidate the obscurities of some of the characters and incidents dwelt on in many of the pieces. On reflection, I decided that any sort of background details would be in danger of taking up almost as much space as the essays themselves, and the interested reader can always have recourse, in this day and age, to Google or Wikipedia.

I note, with a certain grim satisfaction, that while my articles offered a series of solutions over the years to certain chronic ills of our state, virtually none have been acted on, leaving the problems I adverted to still remaining to be solved. I think particularly of the scandal of insurance claims and legal costs generally, about which I have something of a bee in my bonnet. The peak of my activity occurred in the late 1980s and early nineties, when the late C.J. Haughey was dominating the political scene, and heading for a fall, only to be succeeded, after some upheavals, by the inimitable Bertie Ahern, so that many pieces reflect the excitements of that era. I also, however, did book reviews for the paper at an earlier period, mainly in the area of international politics, which are excluded from the present collection.

I have also included a small selection of letters written to the Editor of The Irish Times over the years that have survived the ravages of time, and also seem to me to touch on issues of lasting importance.

The title of this collection derives simply from the fact that the COVID-19 lockdowns of the Spring and Winter of 2020, while in many ways tedious and depressing, also provided time for going through archives and attempting to put some shape on one’s life. I realised suddenly that I had time to compile the paperwork for a collection of these essays, which, as a journalist friend once remarked to me, sadly, would otherwise simply provide wrapping for tomorrow’s fish and chips. As it is, given the unexpected opportunity to compile them into a book in 2020, they may live to see another day.

John Dillon

*

Irish Times:

Articles and Interviews

*

Hyenas at Harar

May 31, 1963

‘When you are a Moslem, I will consider you my master’, replied Abdulahi bin Mohamed. the last Emir of Harar, to the demand of Menelik II that Harar submit to incorporation in the Ethiopian Reich. He enclosed with the message a robe, a turban and a prayer-mat. It was the end of 1886, and the Egyptian troops, with their British ‘advisers’ had just pulled out of the ancient city, having decided that they had after all no real interest in it. They left Abdulahi in command of a feeble defence force, inadequate even to control the surrounding Galla tribes.

The British here came in for some bitter criticism from Arthur Rimbaud, who had been in Harar for some years as agent for a merchant in Aden. ‘It is precisely the British with their absurd policy’, he complained, ‘who have undermined and continue to undermine all the trade along the coast. They wished to improve everything and they have done more damage than the Egyptians whom they have successfully ruined. Their Gordon is an idiot and their Wolseley is an ass. Everything they touch is a never ending progression of absurdities and waste.’

But Rimbaud got out in good time. Menelik’s reply was direct and uncompromising: ‘I will come to Harar and replace the mosque by a Christian church. Await me!’ On January 7th, 1887, his forces crushed the army of Abdulahi at Chalenco, and Menelik entered Harar. And now the Cathedral of Medhanie Alem (Saviour of the World) dominates the Faras Magala (the Horse Market) the main square of the city. The mosque, however, still stands. Harar had been closed to infidels until Sir Richard Burton won through to it in 1855. Exaggerated reports had spread of its wealth and power, which Burton was able to deflate a good deal. Still, it remained a mysterious city, and even in 1963 I hoped to find some aura remaining.

The drive up from Dire Dawa is magnificent. Dire Dawa, the mid-way stop on the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railway, is down in the Rift Valley, but Harar is in the hills, 5,500 ft. up. It is on the first (or last) section of the Ethiopian plateau, which rises out of the flat deserts of Dankalia and the Ogaden. Historically, it is more closely connected with the mediaeval Somali kingdom of Adal, from which Ahmed Graññ launched his devastating invasion of Ethiopia in the fourteenth century.

The approach from the north is dominated by a magnificent boulevard, flanked by the various buildings of the Harar Military Academy, the Sandhurst of Africa, but this obscures the entrance to the Old City. One has to drive round to the south to see the city spread out on its hill, as Burton must have seen it. The old walls are breached and crumbling, but still confine the city within them. There is one street in the city along which a car may be driven, and it runs from north to south, opening into the Faras Magala in the middle. Otherwise one must go on foot through tiny, winding streets with dilapidated old Arab houses on either side. There is not really much to see, when one gets down to it. The mosque is of venerable age, but completely plain, and Rimbaud’s house is not of great interest. The market is colourful, but then so are all markets in Ethiopia. Besides old coins and suchlike relics, one can buy basketwork of elaborate and colourful design. Harar also produces, in small quantities, some of the best coffee in the world.

The only other thing the old city is now noted for is its hyenas. Nowhere else in the world, perhaps, is the hyena such an accepted institution. They roam round the walls at night and walk the streets, quite at peace with the inhabitants, if not with the inhabitants’ dogs. The only disturbing aspect of their presence is their constant whooping. There is, in the shadow of the south wall, an old gentleman who lives with the hyenas, and he is now becoming something of a tourist attraction. Every night he holds court, summons his friends by name, talks to them, and distributes bones. He has become a bit stingy of late, though, and the bones looked dry and unappetising. The hyenas accept the bones out of politeness, while their sad, nervous eyes look around for something better. We concluded, since the new bones so closely resembled the old, that the poor hyenas had to dodge round behind the wall after being dismissed and give the bones back. They were certainly a tyrannised and depressed company.

But it is the military academy and the rapidly-expanding teachers’ training college that constitute Harar’s real contribution to contemporary Ethiopia. We were shown round the former, and generally splendidly entertained, by an Indian colonel we had known from Addis, and saw enough to realise that it is a very businesslike place. It is modelled consciously on Sandhurst and turns out a very high class of graduate. The policy has been to go around the secondary schools of the empire in the summer term and select all the most promising pupils, and pack them off to Harar. This results in excellent standards, but also, it seems to me, will tend to create a ‘young officer’ class, as exemplified by one young lieutenant I met.

‘The problem is,’ he said to me over coffee, his face creased in a tense frown, ‘are we going to have enough time to get Ethiopia fixed in the twentieth century? If there were to be a revolution now, there would not be enough of us to ensure that the country will move forward and not back. As things are now, it will sink back into darkness, dragging us with it.’ The conclusion was that the Old Man must hold on a while longer, until a few more young men have established themselves.

The teachers’ training college is not nearly so impressive a place, and the standards have been low, but this year it doubled in size and acquired a new director, a Canadian Jesuit of volcanic enthusiasm, who is determined to raise standards and expand still further. Also, the Army has agreed to stop taking all the best students for the military academy.

Harar is a favoured place, being not only almost perfect climatically, but also the birthplace of Haile Selassie (his father, Ras Makonnen, was governor here). The Emperor visits it at least once a year, for the pilgrimage to Kulubi on St. Gabriel’s Day, and usually more often than that. It is also of considerable strategic importance as the gateway to the Ogaden, and a number of army divisions are stationed in the area, in case the Somali Republic should be so foolish at any time as to launch an attack.

A talk with Jomo Kenyatta

December 14, 1963

Only once, so far, I think, have I had the feeling that I was in the presence of a great man, and that was when I met Jomo Kenyatta in Nairobi on Sept. 12th, 1962. In the midst of the thronging friends and petitioners who besieged his office in the Ministry of Finance, he consented to discuss with me briefly the future of Kenya, or Africa, and of the world.

I had gone along to Solar House, his personal headquarters, one of the new blocks of flats that are steadily rising up on the south side of the city, on the off-chance of being granted an interview. Since I could not claim to belong to any newspaper, or even to be contemplating an article, I did not expect too much.

I was presented to Achieng Oneko, his personal secretary (now Minister of Information), who had been sentenced along with Jomo for the founding of Mau Mau, and asked him if there was any possibility of the Old Man sparing me a moment. When he heard that I was from Ethiopia, he was extremely friendly, and promised to do what he could. And he did, because when I returned a few days later, he told me that the Mzee (the ‘Old Man’) would see me next morning at eleven o’clock. I went off in confusion to try and think up some intelligent questions.

Next morning I returned to Solar House, and then walked over with Achieng Oneko to the Ministry of Finance, where Jomo was holding down the rather formal job of Minister of State for Constitutional Affairs in a suite of offices on the second floor. On the way over, we talked about Ethiopia, where Mr Oneko had been the previous autumn with Jomo, on a very successful semi-official visit. During his stay, Jomo had given a talk at the university, to which I had brought down my senior English class, from the school where I was teaching.

I had heard the Mzee addressing his people at Bahati location the previous Sunday, and I had been overwhelmed by his presence and the control that he had over the crowd. This was a meeting held to effect a reconciliation between Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga, his two chief and ever-quarrelling lieutenants. The English reporters that I was with were in great excitement in expectation of a riot, but Odinga, in fact wisely, failed to show up (Nairobi is a solid Mboya stronghold). When the car carrying the leaders appeared, however, there was great excitement amongst the crowd, and the KANU Youth Wing had a lot of trouble holding them back. As the leaders mounted the platform, there was still much shouting and cheering, but when Jomo turned to face them and raised his arms, a silence fell. Then he told them to sit down, and, like a field of corn bent by the wind, the whole assembly sat down. He then addressed them for two hours.

Now, as I entered the room, the vast grizzled figure in the chair a few feet away was too much for me. He sprang up, however, leaned across his desk with a broad smile to grasp my hand, and offered me a seat. He was apparently delighted at this intrusion. There were a number of other people in the room, all of whom clustered round us, smiling expectantly. I confessed that I was not really writing for any newspaper, but had just wanted to meet him.

‘All right’, he said, cheerfully. His English was